


Happenstance

by rizahawkaye



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, First Dates, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Love, Pining, Politics, Romance, Royai - Freeform, Soulmates, bartender roy, journalist riza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:38:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizahawkaye/pseuds/rizahawkaye
Summary: Roy never pursued alchemy. Riza is a journalist. They meet at Ishval's border.





	Happenstance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vino_and_doggos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vino_and_doggos/gifts).



> i wrote this for my friend Paige bc she is v kind. ;; this piece was actually going to be a piece i did for the RoyAi zine over on Tumblr, but i opted for one involving Madame Christmas instead. still, i was overjoyed to have a reason to write this! it was so much fun. ;;

The rain assaulted the roof of Moe’s, a rickety old bar off the corner of Desert and More Desert Plus Rocks. Roy had to empty the bucket in the hall twice in the last hour as the wooden roof became too saturated to act a sponge any longer. He could hear the leak _plip plunk plink_ on separate parts of the bucket and after twenty minutes the noise started to drive him mad. He pressed his fingers into his temples and groaned, bending forward to peer across the bar, which was close to empty. A lack of customers meant the night would move slowly for Roy, who wasn’t scheduled to leave until early the next morning. **  
**

He sighed and pressed his cheek to the cool countertop. He would hesitate to call himself a bartender. He dabbled in alchemy, he played the field - as Hughes would say - and he tossed drinks together in a small metal container and poured them for old military men and their boisterous foot soldiers. Hardly a career or a label, and certainly not worthy of his undivided attention, he’d say. 

“Well what is worthy, then?” the memory of Riza Hawkeye’s soft voice filtered into his head. She had touched the end of her pen to her chin, smiling. Roy must have sounded like a naive little boy to her, but she never admonished him for it. “There has to be someone or something you’re wholeheartedly interested in, Mr. Not a Bartender.”

Roy pinned his dark eyes on the threshold to Moe’s, waiting to hear the bell ding above the thin door and see her wander in, her nose tucked into the fat, blue-black notepad she kept perched in her hand. She was slated to arrive any moment, the rain be damned.

Roy called her _Miss Hawkeye_ and she’d dubbed him _Mr. Mustang_. He felt she was comfortable with the distance their more formal titles gave them and so he never tried to steer her into calling him by his first name. He was, after all, a gentleman as well as an amateur alchemist and guy-who-makes-drinks; the women who had raised him had seen to that.

“What’re ya in for?” he’d smirk when she walked in. She always tucked a pen behind her ear with her hair and smiled.

“Something nonalcoholic, Mr. Mustang. I’ve got work to do.” She’d wave the notepad at him as though he or anyone else could ever miss it.

When she finally arrived tonight, though, she opted for whiskey with three cubes of ice. Her pen stayed pinched between her index finger and thumb and her hair fanned across her forehead, stuck there in a mixture of rainwater and sweat. She took a seat at the far left end of the bar, sloughing her coat off to lay it over the bar top. Her notepad looked soggy.

Roy frowned but kept quiet. He fished around for the right glass for her drink and served it the way she’d ordered it with three uniform pieces of ice from the bucket beneath the bar. She took a healthy sip when he handed it over and sighed, finally pushing the mess of matted blonde hair away from her face. Her brown eyes reflected as amber in the glow of the white neon signs against the walls and the hanging yellowed light bulbs from above.

Roy tended to the sparse few other customers but kept her in his periphery. She squinted at her notepad through the dimness of the room, her pen spinning around her fingers nervously. As patrons came and went, as the hours dragged by, she stayed rooted to her stool. Her ice melted into the whiskey but she kept sipping every dozen minutes or so between furious scribbles over the paper of her notepad.

Roy realized rather suddenly that she had been frequenting the bar for a few months now, and she’d yet to tell him what it was she came in to write about in the dead of night. Her usual demeanor was gentle and subdued, like her days would be best spent in the desert heat playing ball with the displaced Ishvalan children in the nearby slums. But Roy knew better. When she walked through the door she brought the sharp twang of iron, the muted, oily stench of gunpowder. Whatever it was she did it didn’t involve outdoor games with kids. 

The situation in the east and with the Ishvalans was “evolving,” as Führer Bradley had so carefully put it. Evolving, Roy decided, in the way cells malfunctioned and multiplied, building tumors and deadly diseases. There was a time in his life where Roy contemplated the military - even alchemy - as his label and career but that time was long past, and the draw to protect his nation had died with the first Ishvalan child to suffer at the hands of an Amestrian soldier.

Roy had stupidly elected to work out east before the war had broken out. His father had migrated from Xing to Amestris some thirty-odd years ago and Roy felt a pull toward the desert. Whether that pull came from Roy himself or not he could never know, but a large part of him was attracted to Ishval. And to the woman at the end of the bar, holding her head in her hands, blonde tendrils poking out between her fingers.

Hughes had said something to Roy once along the lines of, “Those people you feel the most for, Roy? Those are the ones you’ve known for as many years as the universe has existed.”

Somehow Roy knew Riza Hawkeye was one of those people. It wasn’t only her beauty that captivated him, but her spectacular dedication to whatever kind of work she did; she was straight laced and haloed by soft, royal blue light, like she carried the cloudless eastern sky on her shoulders. And Roy was in awe of her, every night and every time she came to Moe’s to nurse a glass of water and keep him company.

The hour crept closer and closer to closing, and Roy’s manager instructed him to start preparing the customers to leave. Roy approached Riza first and tapped his fingers on the bar top in front of her. She startled into a sitting position, the tip of her pen marking a line through her paragraphs as she moved. She sighed heavily, tiredly.

“I’m so sorry,” Roy said. “I didn’t know you were, uh…” He surveyed the sloppy scrawl in the light blue lines on the paper below him. The notepad was decorated by a number of pastel notes stuffed between its pages.

Riza blew her fringe out of her face and gathered her coat and notepad, throwing the last of her warm watered down whiskey down the back of her throat. “I wasn’t sleeping or anything like that, Mr. Mustang,” she said. “But I was concentrating so hard that I might as well have been.”

Roy took her glass and started to scrub at it in the shallow sink below the mirror on the other side of the bar. Riza shrugged her coat on, which was still damp from the earlier rain. Roy no longer heard it pounding against the thin wooden roof. He watched her in the mirror, forcing her arms through the coat’s sleeves and wincing when the coldness of them met her room temperature skin.

“What were you concentrating on?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. But he was desperately curious, especially because her brow had been furrowed into a severe line over her eyes since she joined him at the bar hours prior.

Riza was quiet at first, biting on her bottom lip. Then finally she said, “Führer Bradley’s executive order.”

“His what?” Roy said, the glass slipping from his hands to drop into the sink. He rinsed it off and turned his attention back to Riza, who started to look very small against the backdrop of tables and chairs and wall-length windows crisscrossed by thin white strips of wood.

Riza took the notepad and slid it over the counter to him. He read the first few scribbled lines: _Führer Bradley refuses to comment on the order. What is he trying to do? Win a war or commit mass genocide?_

A few lines later: _State Alchemists protect the people, or so they say. What are they doing murdering civilians? There should be no place for this kind of barbaric slaughter in our world._

Roy held the notepad at arm’s length, like it might strike him. “His executive order involves alchemists and the war?” he ventured.

“You’re going to hear about it sooner or later so I guess I’ll elaborate.” She sat back down directly in front of him this time. “Führer Bradley has signed Executive Order number 3066 which effectively turns State Alchemists into human weapons. Any alchemist with combative abilities serving directly under the military will be deployed to Ishval to exterminate the Ishvalan people.

“Not defeat,” she clarified, though Roy didn’t raise any questions, “but _exterminate_ , Mr. Mustang. He wants to murder Ishvalans - all of them.”

The air in the bar became suffocating all at once, like someone had stolen the oxygen straight from it. Roy gulped on a breath and handed the notepad back to its owner, who forced it into a pocket in the lining of her coat.

“I thought you hung out with kids out there,” he tried to joke, jerking his head in the direction of the bar’s front door. Riza gave him a quizzical look.

“I’m a journalist,” she said, “so I guess I sometimes hang out with the children, although they are becoming hard to find. Mostly I sit in tents with cadets and enlisted men and listen to them tell their tales. Although today -”

“Roy!” Roy’s manager barked. He stood near the entrance to the bar, his fingers turning the sign to signal that it was closed. His red, round face scrunched together around his nose. Riza got the hint, smiling politely to Roy. She waved a meager goodbye.

“See you tomorrow,” she said. “Assuming this place is still standing.”

Roy nearly said goodbye back and then stopped himself, Hughes’ words echoing in his mind. “Ah - wait!” he called. “Let me walk you home.” Roy’s manager glared at him, but Riza chuckled.

“You’re working,” she said.

“Give me fifteen minutes and I won’t be.”

Riza nodded her agreement. Roy pivoted on his heel and worked tirelessly at the sticky spots over the countertop - he seared his hands under the hot water from the sink as he hurriedly cleaned glasses until they were spotless. He helped his manager overturn chairs and pile them onto the tables, and he swept around their legs faster than he ever had before. When he finished, he muttered a quick goodbye to his boss and stumbled out the door, flinging his apron onto the coat hooks.

Riza Hawkeye was waiting for him in the damp evening air. She had her gaze set on the fuzzy red and yellow lights coming from East City. Roy tried to announce his arrival so he wouldn’t startle her but he choked on the words, and it didn’t matter anyway. She’d heard him.

“It’s been seventeen minutes, you know.” She said, and smiled. Roy dipped his head.

“I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive my unintentional fib, Miss Hawkeye. I knew it would take me longer than fifteen minutes, but I worried if I’d told you seventeen you might not have stayed.”

“Good call,” she laughed, “I can do fifteen minutes, but two more than that is ridiculous.”

“I thought journalists were supposed to have patience,” Roy teased.

“Maybe the ones who don’t spend their days out here.”

Roy struggled to find the appropriate words. The silence was pregnant, full of tension and disappointment, none of which were caused by either party. Bradley fathered this particular discontentment, as he seemed inclined to do recently, and Roy wanted to wipe it away like the spills on his countertop.

Living in the east was like living in a history book as it was being written. He saw soldiers hobbling around East City on crutches, missing legs and eyes and bottom lips and fingers. But if East City was the top of the hill, the crest of eastern civilization, then Ishval was the ditch. Roy never saw those injuries raw and red, seeping or spewing blood. He’d never caught sight of bone ringed by flesh, veins and arteries split at the ends, dribbling over the exposed ligaments and tendons. But he’d bet a week’s paycheck that Riza had, and the nature of her job was to report on the dirty details. Those cadets and enlisted men she sat in tents with - were they whole?

“Do you like being a bartender, Mr. Mustang?”

Roy didn’t correct her. He was many things, after all, least of all a bartender. He merely said, “I was raised in a bar, Miss Hawkeye. I’m starting to think I gravitate to what I know no matter where I am.”

“Riza,” she offered.

“Riza,” he affirmed. Then, gently: “Which way to your place?”

Riza quirked an eyebrow playfully. “That’s a little presumptuous of you, Roy.”

“I did say, ‘Let me walk you home,’” he said, the tips of his ears burning.

“And walk me home you shall.”

So he did. Roy and Riza, Riza and Roy walked together side-by-side in the inky black darkness of night. The only thing lighting their way was the pale white moonlight bleeding through the clouds. Roy tipped his head back and watched them creep across the sky, grey and full and threatening. He wished he had an umbrella, just in case. Though his company didn’t seem to be as concerned with the weather as she was with watching her feet as she walked, her dark boots splattered with mud as she paid no attention to puddles she trekked through. Her mind was obviously off and far away, in a distant land, cradled on all sides by tan tents and blood stained towels and the moans of Bradley’s toy soldiers.

Their walk was quiet, mostly. Roy wanted to give Riza her space to think, to be in whatever moment her thoughts had caged her in. He didn’t know things about her - he didn’t know where she came from, why she was here, or how. But her hand, chilled and sprinkled with leftover rain, brushed over his as they swayed along the cracked sidewalk together. Roy took a leap, and curled his larger, warmer fingers into hers. She reciprocated.

Roy thought on how odd it was that he felt like her hand was made to fit in his.

“I grew up in the east,” Riza said. Her breath puffed from her mouth in a white dust of heat. “With my father.” The way she said father was the way Roy would say _I’m not a bartender_ or his foster mother would say _we should string those military elites up by their balls in Central’s square_. He didn’t pry, just squeezed her hand - a stranger who wasn’t, not really.

“I lived in a rundown house out in the country. The earth really swells out there, with tall and wide hills stretching and stretching along the horizon, breaking it up into waves.”

And Roy heard it all at once, her eastern drawl poking out from between her teeth, which she kept clenched to keep that part of her jailed and away.

“My mother died when I was very young and my father was not good…” she trailed, leaving the implications to fall around them silently. “He passed when I was a teenager and I got myself through college and found my way to journalism quite organically. Or rather, I found myself somewhat involved with Olivier Armstrong for a time. She introduced me to many different kinds of people who opened many different kinds of doors for me.”

“Armstrong?” Roy said. “Do you mean _The Northern Wall_ Armstrong?”

Riza smiled. “Yes, I do.”

“I was assigned to Ishval by my publisher. It pays well, but I sometimes think I would prefer to eat bread and beans every day than to be out there.” She pointed her chin in the direction of the flickering lamplights that lined the Amestrian camps along Ishval’s border.

“Can’t say I blame you,” was all Roy could offer her.

After many more minutes of quietly walking together, hand in hand, along the bumpy concrete sidewalk, Riza announced: “This is it.”

Her apartment building was lacking in security, and an adequate foundation, Roy noticed. He scrunched up his nose in disapproval. The sides of the building were decorated in cracks, some as wide as the thickest part of his thumb. Weeds grew from the bottom, eating up parts of the wooden rails and erupting from broken bits of concrete near the ground. The outer door - one which should require a key for tenants to get in - was propped open with an old brick, chipped and weather-worn. Riza noticed his unhappy frown and shook his arm gently.

“It works,” she said, “and no one bothers me.”

“You walk here alone after coming to the bar every night?” He asked, trying not to sound too concerned. He barely knew her, after all.

Riza tugged his hand down just enough for him to tip over on his side a little. With his cheek closer, she reached up and gave him a kiss there, her lips soft and cool over his skin. He caught her face in his hand before she could pull away, and he asked a question with his eyes that she answered by wrapping a hand around the back of his neck. They kissed there on the sidewalk, beneath the shadow of a dying apartment building, two strangers who were drawn together by a tragedy they could never take part in.

And Roy knew deep in his gut, he knew it like a fact - like the things Riza wrote about in her notebook - that his place in his country, and in Riza Hawkeye’s life, was a fragile one, forever changing in whichever universe he woke in.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you liked it, Paige!! (and i hope u noticed that i snuck Oliviza in as well ajsbdkfjhgkbfjdk)


End file.
